DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Dec 6, 2005 5:27:06 GMT 4
THE AMERICAN RESISTANCE - THE TIME HAS ARRIVED By: Ted Lang The time has arrived – a designation must be assigned to the increasing number of Americans who are fed up and terrified by the unbelievable and staggering criminal acts perpetrated both domestically and internationally by the Bush gang. Bush and his GOP are targeting and immediately attacking any and all inspirations of accurate journalistic reporting of administration wrongdoing, proving all the more how despotic American government has become. Only days ago, the Washington Post broke the story of secret prisons abroad, and what was the reaction on Capitol Hill? Republican Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, was angered not by the illegal activity and the disgrace it brings upon America, but offered instead: "My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security – period. That is a legitimate concern." If this isn’t a clear case of a simpleton shooting the messenger, I don’t know what is! The volatility and unpredictable dangers of our totally out-of-control and dangerous government should be more than obvious. The more the American people learn about the mass murder of innocent civilians by internationally-banned weapons of destruction and death, and also of the secret prisons and their torture chambers authorized by these criminals, the more desperate they, the criminals, will become and the greater the harm they will inflict upon our nation and the world. In this regard, the real media, the Internet or alternative media [AM], are both a blessing and a potential expeditor of more disastrous Bush crimes against humanity. In addition to being a hindrance to the Bushevik regime in terms of slowing down the planned bombings of Syria and Iran to further the annexation of the entire Middle East into the American Empire, time is beginning to run out for Bush and his cabal of international war criminals. The Internet keeps exposing their planned and intended crimes beforehand. How many people educated by the AM are there? But the AM is out there alone, and without any modicum of support from the corporate establishment mainstream media [MSM]. In spite of the Post’s "insensitivity" in reporting the truth about illegal American government activities, the "national security" excuse is once again being invoked by government traitors anytime a MSM editor makes the mistake of accurately reporting an item of news that brings criticism of the emperor’s acts of genocide, torture and napalm and white phosphorus secret mass murders. It is for these reasons that BOTH the MSM and the AM, the Internet, will fail to provide any more serious obstacles to Bush’s plans for world conquest. The only chance America and the world have left is the American Resistance. Bush must be impeached, but that will only happen if Democrats persevere in the 2006 Mid-Term elections. That’s too far away time-wise to be of any help right now. The only solution ensuring the safety of humanity against Bush is for Patrick J. Fitzgerald to initiate massive indictments immediately! The possible indictments of war criminals Karl Rove, **** Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld over the next two weeks will be of immense help in stopping the Bush war machine. Should this happen, of secondary importance will be the classification and codification of Bush regime atrocities setting him up for the post 2006 Mid-Term election impeachment proceedings. This is where the American Resistance will play an important role. So who and what comprise the "American Resistance?" Clearly, they are not American voters – American voters are, for the most part, uninformed as to precisely what’s going on behind the closed doors of their secret government. Voting never occurs at a time when it can be employed to make a difference. Naturally, the key contributory factor to the ignorance of Americans as to what is really going on has been the news blackouts by the MSM. These blackouts are largely consensual on the part of the "Big Eight" Zionist media magnates who thrill to the massive advantage Bush’s insanity provides for Israel. Additionally, as coined by former Alabama Governor, George Wallace, "There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats." Adding to the inefficacy of the ballot box when needed to affect change is the growing evidence that elections are now being fixed by the political parties. There is nothing new about vote manipulation – Cook County dirty tricks involving voters’ ballots and votes by dead people, as well as "hanging chads" in Florida, have demonstrated the truth of this observation. But now we have electronic balloting, which has no auditable paper trail. Voting is demonstrably futile; that is, unless it is overwhelmingly a landslide and intended to remove incumbents to facilitate the impeachment of a much-hated criminal president that has lied and has killed and maimed so many. And once in public office, what of their oath to that office, and accountability to the people, once campaigning politicians assume public office upon their electoral victories? What about their responsibilities to their constituents? Government accountability is yet another American pipe dream – elected politicians remain so, continuing as politicians serving themselves and their party via cash spoils from lobbyists and large corporate interest groups. America’s leading industry nowadays is war and the manufacture and deployment of its killing machines. America has, for all purposes and intents, no First Amendment media, no voter impact, no control over self-serving politicians and their parties, and lacks also any alternative approach for throttling dangerous American out-of-control government. The American Resistance is that small but growing group of informed Americans who oppose domestic police state tyranny as well as the international acts of mass murder and torture now being exported internationally by the United States and its war-making industry. And leading the American Resistance, are those TRUE American Patriots who have risked, and who are willing to risk, everything to help set the American people free. The Bush regime has wordsmithed and put into place all the legislation required to legitimize the brutal military enforcement of total subservience to the American political State. The American Resistance gains prominence through the words and actions of Cindy Sheehan; she had earned the right to complain. The American Resistance gains strength by the TRUE patriotism displayed by LT COL Karen Kwiatkowski, BG Generals Janis Karpinsky and Rick Baccus, FBI Agents Kenneth Williams and Coleen Rowley, FBI linguist Sibel Edmonds, former Secretary and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill and Paul Craig Roberts, Richard Clark, and many others that can be added to this list. What distinguishes these leaders as creators of the American Resistance? Actually, for the most part, these are ordinary, everyday 9-to-5 people. In spite of their employment with the FBI, Agents Williams, Rowley and translator Edmonds had lackluster jobs until thrust into the limelight by the criminal machinations of the Bush war machine. What distinguishes them most, however, is that they are newsmakers and therefore virtually immune to media manipulation. Consider the total blackout of Cindy Sheehan’s Washington DC peace demonstration. The MSM had counted on the blackout as being the death knell for the resistance to the Bush regime; but just the opposite happened! Look at Bush’s declining poll numbers! And this in spite of the monumental total blackout and MSM spike effort! This is what is causing hesitation as concerns the planned military strikes on Syria and Iran. How much clout does the AM have? The leaders of the American Resistance realize this simple approach: once the American people know what the Bush war criminals did, it won’t be long for a thundering and screeching cacophony of public outrage to launch the beginnings of Bush’s total downfall and impeachment. The key is in informing the public. The majority of Americans don’t know about the Downing Street Memo, all the important aspects of the Plame-CIA leak, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty covered up by the Johnson administration, the Pentagon Papers, or even the unnecessary wars engaged in by our military to include the Civil War, Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq. The only reason these wars have been singled out is because extensive evidence has been recently uncovered justifying this observation. Even the American Revolution can be shown to have been unnecessary. America will never be informed by the MSM. The MSM is the tool being deployed to shape both public opinion as well as public ignorance. It is the leaders of the American Resistance, and the many denizens of the objective alternative media, that will bring knowledge and understanding to the people. Cindy Sheehan is an example. She created news even the mighty MSM couldn’t spike and hide. And more news-making leaders are emerging. And slowly, ever so slowly, elements of the mainstream media are beginning to understand the life-and-death struggle that free America is now engaged in with the real axis of evil: the political State, its compliant and totally dominated press, and the virtual absence of public awareness. (the second page of the article can be read at www.etherzone.com/2005/lang111805.shtml ) Moderator's note:Although three weeks old,I feel that Mr Lang's article is exeptional,and has many points for forum members to discuss.You are encouraged to visit etherzone.com and come back to this thread to share your thoughts. Silence is deadly. Let us beat peace drums!!! We will not stop until we are heard. What say you,my friends?
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Dec 9, 2005 13:50:12 GMT 4
Oh,and I figured out what I want for my birthday... THE CASE FOR A NATIONAL RECALL ELECTION yahoo.com/news Fri Dec 2, 2:43 PM ET Why Wait Three Years for Our Next President? NEW YORK--By August 2003 California Governor Gray Davis' approval rating had plunged to 22 percent. Two months later, he lost a special recall election. Now it's George W. Bush's turn to take a drubbing. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds that only 37 percent of Americans think he's doing a good job, a record low for him and a dangerous drop below the historical benchmark of 40 percent. "When a president falls below 40 percent approval in public opinion polls--as President Bush has done twice in the past two months--it's usually a sign of serious political danger," writes Richard Benedetto in USA Today. "Since 1950, five of the eight other presidents who fell below 40 percent--Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush--lost their bids for reelection or opted not to run again. A sixth, Richard Nixon, was overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal and resigned. Only two, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, turned things around." But even Clinton never regained his former appeal. His hand-picked successor, vice president Al Gore, won the 2000 election by such a narrow margin that Republicans were able to steal it away. The "political capital" Bush claimed after the 2004 election has vanished over the last year. Dead Americans piled up in Iraq and New Orleans, his closest political allies were indicted for corruption and treason, gas prices soared and his party's right-wing Christianists stabbed him in the back over the Harriet Miers' nomination. All of Bush's best-laid plans--to privatize Social Security, pass another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and possibly expand his wars to Syria and Iran--lie in ruins. And it's only going to get worse now that his moderate and centrist Republican allies in Congress are beginning to peel away: some to appeal to swing voters in next year's midterm elections, others to align themselves with John McCain's incipient 2008 presidential campaign and some simply because Bush's poll numbers make him radioactive. George W. Bush, a tiger who so recently assigned himself the right to assassinate American citizens at will, has been defanged. He's as pathetic and powerless as Saddam Hussein. He is done. "Lame duck" doesn't cut it. Unless Bush resigns, the world's sole superpower faces the dismal prospect of three long years under a dead duck president. Who will extract us from two losing wars? How will we pay off the $8 trillion national debt he ran up? America needs a strong president yesterday. Bush could save himself and the nation three years of marking time by resigning. Or Congress could do the right thing and impeach him for his countless crimes. Maybe Bush and Cheney will get indicted for their roles in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. But our constitutional system only allows for impeaching individuals, not whole administrations. If Cheney is indicted and forced to quit, Bush will appoint a replacement--Washington scuttlebutt points to secretary of state Condi Rice. If Bush falls, Rice ascends. If something happens to Rice, the person she chose as vice president succeeds her. All the political hacks who lied and schemed and whose incompetence led to the current crisis of leadership--Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove--stay in place. The hydra lives. More young men and women die in Iraq. One solution is to establish a California-style recall system on the national level. If a significant percentage of Americans loses confidence in the president and his administration to the extent that they're willing to sign a recall petition, a special election should be held within three months. The number of required signatures should be high enough--California's system calls for 12 percent of the number of people who cast votes in the preceding election--to ensure that recalls are only held as the result of widespread disgust among the citizenry. To avoid disruption, the constitutional amendment creating the recall provision could prevent such elections from being held more often than, say, annually. And a recall won't automatically result in a new party taking over the White House--just a new administration. But it would replace our current system of political stagnation with a more dynamic democracy. The threat of recall would make sitting leaders responsive to the people more often than the current four-year election cycle, and would allow disastrous and unpopular leaders like Bush to be replaced posthaste. Of course, national recall elections wouldn't guarantee that the people would always be happy with their leaders. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who replaced Gray Davis after the recall, currently "ranks among the most unpopular governors in modern California history," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. But Californians don't have to wait until the next election to get rid of him
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Dec 19, 2005 21:11:51 GMT 4
Please follow this link to an excellent article on what is transpiring- tvnewslies.org/html/identity_theft_of_america.html I should pass this along, as well: (from The Pen <activist.gb@gmail.com) For those who have argued that the voices of we the people no longer count, we say witness the filibuster of the Patriot Action extension and the triumph of the McCain torture prohibition amendment. TELL CONGRESS WE NEED REAL HEARINGS ON SPYING IN THE U.S. WITHOUT WARRANT Considering that virtually every word out of the president's mouth for the last five years has been a certifiably pathological lie, one cannot fault those who suspect his angry and defiant defense of his secret campaign to spy on Americans is just another elaborate fiction. What has been the point of packing our courts with their reactionary partisan cronies if not to have them available to rubberstamp such an operation? The fact that they could not trust even one of their own handpicked legal kangaroos to authorize this is proof of just how out of control this rogue presidency is. Remember this is from an administration that considers a handful of Quakers holding a peace meeting to be a "threat". It is but sheer, unmitigated gall to assert that this is in any way permissible under our Constitution, which for Bush is nothing more than a bothersome, inconvenient piece of toilet paper. In fact, according to White House insiders, in one of his recent abusive personal tirades Bush did indeed refer to our Constitution as "just a [profane expletive] piece of paper". It's long past time for Congress to pull this president back into the ballpark of democracy. ACTION PAGE: www.millionphonemarch.com/fisa.htmWith the revelation of this latest abusive outrage, the last thing need we need is another panting reactionary lap dog to rule that the trashing of our Constitution is somehow OK after all. And in a frightening replay of the Roberts' confirmation amnesia of his membership in the right wing Federalist society, Alito claims not to remember his own membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton where he graduated in the last all white male class. Except that he TOUTED this on his job application to become a Reagan administration crony. And what were they so "concerned" about? Why, the admission of minorities and women of course! Please tell your senator that NO conservative is acceptable as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor ACTION PAGE: www.nocrony.comJust before he stormed away from the podium, Bush obstinately declared that he would continue to defy the law by authorizing a permanent campaign of warrantless searches as long as he was president. Fine, Mr. Bush, in that case you must no longer be president. You must be removed peacefully, and at the first democratic opportunity. If the case for impeachment were not already compelling, this must surely be the last straw for anyone was who giving you the benefit of a reasonable doubt. Let us tell the House to gird up its loins and draft the articles now. ACTION PAGE: www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach.htmPlease take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this message to everyone else you know.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jan 25, 2006 14:58:00 GMT 4
Independance Day
Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence? Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.
Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.
Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.
Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton. At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr, noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.
Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild-eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
They gave you and me a free and independent America. The history books never told you a lot about what happened in the Revolutionary War. We didn't fight just the British. We were British subjects at that time and we fought our own government! Some of us take these liberties so much for granted, but we shouldn't....
Remember: freedom is never free! I hope you will show your support by please sending this to as many people as you can. It's time we get the word out that patriotism is NOT a sin....
Dr. Jon M. Engelhardt, Dean College of Education P.O. Box 131 Wichita State University Wichita, KS 67260
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Feb 18, 2006 13:49:19 GMT 4
The Enemy By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 17 February 2006
They called it "Cyber Storm," and it was a war-game exercise run last week by the Department of Homeland Security. The war game had nothing to do with testing the security of our shipping ports, borders, infrastructure or airports. "Cyber Storm" was testing the government's ability to withstand an onslaught of information and protest from bloggers and online activists.
"Participants confirmed," wrote the Associated Press, that "parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events."
Say what? Online expressions of political opinion are so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security must war-game scenarios to deal with them? Bloggers are potential terrorists now? Bloggers are the enemy? Last week, as far as DHS was concerned, they were.
We hear a great deal about enemies these days. Don't criticize the war, or you'll embolden the enemy. The enemy is clever and cruel. Stick with the White House and we'll defeat the enemy. Since the Bush administration no longer likes to mention the name Osama bin "Stayin' Alive" Laden in public, lest everyone remember a dramatic promise long broken, any specific definition of an enemy changes with the moment.
Sometimes, the enemy is in Iraq, and we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Sometimes, the enemy is in Iran, allegedly toiling with all its collective might to manufacture nuclear weapons. Sometimes, the enemy is in Palestine, where Hamas used George W. Bush's exported democracy to take over the government. Sometimes, the enemy is an American face on a television offering criticism of the White House. Last week, the enemy was a blogger making a political expression.
The enemy is never in Saudi Arabia, though that nation is the very birthing bed of international terrorism. The enemy is never in Israel, though that nation's far-right leadership has been a good deal of the impetus behind the Bush administration's calamitous push into Iraq. The enemy is never in China, even when they smack our planes out of the sky, because they own a substantial portion of our debt. The enemy is never in Pakistan, though that nation's fundamentalist wing allies itself with the Taliban, and though they actually do possess nuclear weapons. The enemy is occasionally mentioned as being in North Korea, but not often, because we want no part of that fight.
For a time, the enemy was in the United Arab Emirates. Two of the hijackers of the September 11 aircraft were citizens of the United Arab Emirates, and the funding behind those attacks was wired through the UAE's banking system. Republican and Democratic Senators believe the UAE has been used as a conduit for the proliferation of nuclear technology.
That was then, however. A company named Dubai Ports World intends to spend $6.8 billion to gain control of the management of shipping ports in New York and New Jersey, as well as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami. Dubai Ports World is foreign-owned, but is backed financially by the government of the United Arab Emirates. In other words, a nation suspected of being a significant player in the September 11 attacks is being allowed to take control of our borders. For the record, US ports handle an estimated two billion tons of cargo annually, with only 5% of that cargo undergoing inspection. The deal has already been granted regulatory clearance by the White House.
We hear a great deal about enemies, both real and contrived. Let us ponder, for a moment, the existence of another enemy so insidious that it operates fully in daylight but beyond control. This enemy seeks to destroy the rule of constitutional law in the United States. This enemy seeks to destroy the seed-corn defense against tyranny in this nation, the separation of powers. This enemy gathers more and more power to itself to achieve these goals, and uses fear and division to do so. This enemy will lie with impunity, stonewall endlessly and ruin anyone who might disrupt its plans.
This enemy stood by and did nothing while a major American city was devoured by the ocean. When New Orleans was drowned, many voices were raised in panicked unison that the White House must do something, and do something now. A conference call was held between key members of the Department of Homeland Security and other administration officials on August 29th, the day the catastrophe began for real. Investigators are seeking the transcript of this call, but administration officials claim the transcript has somehow disappeared. There are many transcripts of calls before and after this one, but the five-hour call on August 29th, the specific call investigators want to see, simply cannot be found.
This enemy deliberately reached out and destroyed the career of a deep-cover CIA agent named Valerie Plame, because her husband dared to criticize the White House about its "uranium from Niger" lie regarding Iraq. Plame, among other things, worked clandestinely to track any person, group or nation that would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists; in other words, Plame worked to track the individuals this White House never fails to label as the enemy. Her work was derailed and her network destroyed because this White House did not want any discussion of the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, despite miles of claims that the stuff was there.
TruthOut correspondent Jason Leopold reported this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is refusing to turn over incriminating emails to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, emails that allegedly indicate the involvement of Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials in the unmasking of Agent Plame. "The emails Gonzales is said to be withholding contained references to Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status and developments related to the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," reported Leopold. "Moreover, according to sources, the emails contained suggestions by the officials on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments [Plame's husband] Joseph Wilson had been making about the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence."
I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was recently indicted by Fitzgerald for lying under oath during the investigation into this matter. Recently, Libby stated that he was authorized by his superiors to expose the classified name of Valerie Plame. Given his position, Libby's main superior is none other than Cheney himself. Cheney recently claimed that he is authorized by an Executive Order to declassify any information he pleases. "I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," said Cheney this week. "There's an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."
This is a new trend for the White House: rendering an illegal act legal retroactively by fiat. The trend manifested itself in another area of illegal activity by the White House, the warrantless wiretapping of thousands of American citizens by the National Security Agency, in defiance of the black-letter law contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. For several weeks now, Congress has been threatening to hold hearings on the matter. Bush advisor Karl Rove worked feverishly behind the scenes to keep such hearings from taking place, and has succeeded. Rather than investigate the matter, Congress will instead rewrite the FISA law, thus rendering retroactively legal White House activities that blatantly broke the law.
We hear a great deal about enemies these days, and many of them are quite real and quite perilous. It is difficult to imagine a more perilous enemy, however, than the one operating out of Washington today. This enemy would set itself on high, beyond control or censure, and create of itself that permanent faction James Madison so earnestly warned us of. This enemy deletes or hides evidence of its calumny, or simply alters existing laws that would otherwise derail its plans. This enemy destroys lives out of hand, lives by the tens of thousands, and reaps a pretty profit in the process.
The difference between the enemies we hear about and the one in Washington is simple and deadly: only the enemy in Washington can annihilate the constitutional government we have enjoyed for more than two centuries. The idea that is America cannot be terminated by terrorists or rogue states. Were the nation entire to be somehow obliterated, the idea that is America would endure. Only its keepers can kill it completely. They are well on their way.
"As nightfall does not come at once," wrote Justice William O. Douglas, "neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness."
We must deal with the enemy within the halls of our government, the enemy whose power to destroy far outstrips any enemy beyond our borders. In doing so, we save that which is unique in the world. In doing so, we deal a death blow to all other enemies. In doing so, we save ourselves from that darkness.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
is there anybody OUT THERE? Please post if this inspired you...to speak up.
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Anwaar
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Speak the truth and keep on coming.
Posts: 463
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Post by Anwaar on Feb 18, 2006 18:22:06 GMT 4
Was it for this reason DT1 that Edward Albert said;
"Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate."
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Feb 19, 2006 11:24:17 GMT 4
Quite so, my friend... It's the "trifecta"thing that the bushmonkey was babbling about. And it is the only card they can play. Time to call them on it.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand...
Michelle posted several superb articles,which I just finished reading. The summary is that we have to shut down the war machine. It is the only way to save ourselves from the darkness.
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Mar 8, 2006 5:21:22 GMT 4
Published on Sunday, March 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org No Deals for Democrats: Quit Bargaining with the Lives of Our Loved Ones by Stacy Bannerman It’s easy to make deals with soldiers’ lives when it’s not your soldier. It’s pretty simple to postpone coming up with an exit strategy when your loved ones are already home. What’s not so easy is sitting across from a familiar stranger, someone who looks like your loved one, but isn’t, not quite. What’s even harder is dining next to an empty chair, day after day, month after month, and year after year. Taking your meals at the bedside of what’s left of your son lying in intensive care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is a whole different degree of difficult. Diane Benson’s 26-year-old boy was still unconscious when he arrived at Walter Reed after being hit by a roadside bomb in Tikrit, north of Baghdad. Latseen Benson, in the 101st Airborne, had his legs blown off, along with part of an arm. If he survives—and it’s still a pretty big if—he will never again sit in his old chair at his mother’s table. Negotiate that, Senator Clinton. Anne Roesler’s son just returned from his third deployment to Iraq in three years. Before he left in August, he told his mom that, if he made it back this time, it would take years for him to recover. Iraq War veterans are already exhibiting post-combat mental health challenges at unprecedented levels. Part of the reason for the escalating psychological problems is that while soldiers were typically sent for one tour-of-duty in Vietnam, more and more troops are serving two, three, and sometimes four rotations in Iraq. Another complication is the moral ambiguity of fighting a war without front lines, and where the combatants are, or are dressed as, civilians, some of them women or teens. Iraqi law allows the use of children as soldiers, and at least 1,000 youths are believed to be serving in the Iraq military, a figure that doesn’t account for the adolescents providing assistance to insurgency forces. There is considerable psychological distress associated with going into a country under the auspices of liberating and helping a people, only to have those people rise up against you, and it lingers long after the war has ended. This nation’s leaders told our soldiers that the people of Iraq would be overjoyed to see them. Forty-five percent of Iraqis think that the insurgents’ attacks on American troops are justified. Eighty percent of Iraqis want the troops out now, as do a majority of Americans. When this administration sent my husband to Iraq, they told him he’d be building schools. Instead, he killed schoolchildren. Now, how is he supposed to deal with that? How does the wife deal with being woken up in the middle of the night by her husband, holding an imaginary gun to her head? The only deals that interest politicians are the ones that will keep them in office. They speak of “phased withdrawals,” a gradual drawing-down of forces, which has been tried before. It didn’t work in Vietnam. It’s sheer arrogance or stupidity to think it will succeed in Iraq. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) said an immediate pullout “would cause more problems for us in America." Does “us” refer to you folks on Capitol Hill? What about the nearly 70 percent of Americans who want the troops out of Iraq? Or do you mean the soldiers who are serving in Iraq, and the families left behind? Because, I assure you, the problem for “us” is not an immediate withdrawal of troops. The problem, for those of us with loved ones in uniform, is that our soldiers are fighting and dying for a lie. Bargaining with the lives of our soldiers is not leadership. It is moral cowardice and an egregious failure of office of the highest order. I’ve come to expect that from the Bush administration, but surely the Democrats can do better. With the exception of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), too many Democrats are trying to make deals with the lives of our soldiers. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean recently endorsed a report by former assistant Defense secretary Lawrence Korb. The ‘strategic redeployment’ concept sets out a plan for a phased troop withdrawal over an 18 month period. Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) recently stated that he thinks: “In 2006, American troops will begin to leave Iraq in large numbers. By the end of the year, I believe we will have redeployed at least 50,000 troops." But Biden, Dean, and far too many other Democrats are remarkably silent about the 80,000 or more troops that would remain in Iraq. And they’re mute when it comes to the 800-plus soldiers who will most likely get killed between now and then, bringing the U.S. body count to around 3,000. That’s playing Russian roulette with our loved ones. If the Democratic leaders don’t play that game with their families, they’ve got no right to play it with ours. Stacy Bannerman is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and on the Advisory Board of Military Families Speak Out. Her book “When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind,” will be released by Continuum Publishing in March 2006. Her husband deployed to Iraq with the Army National Guard 81st Brigade in March 2004, and returned home on March 11, 2005. Mod's note:Every democratic politician who clogs up my inbox pleading for my"support" will be recieving the above article as a reply.Republican lite is not gonna cut it.Getting the hell out of Iraq,and putting the Iran war idea in the trashcan where it belongs, is the only issue this time around.In fact,at this point my stance is NO MORE INCUMBENTS. If we tossed them all out and start over,we could hardly be worse off...
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Post by DT1 on May 4, 2006 11:39:48 GMT 4
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
Pro-American = Anti-BushCo
By Cindy Sheehan
I (and every single other individual on this planet working for peace and justice) am often accused of being "anti-American" for dissenting against my feral government that has gone wild with lawlessness and greed; even though dissent from our government is as American as apple pie. Some people believe that if one is critical of the Bush criminal regime, then one is anti-American.
I steadfastly believe that to be anti-BushCo means being pro-American; pro-life; and most of all: pro-peace.
In a recent article in the Boston Globe (Sun, April 30) the Bush regime is blamed for breaking or giving itself permission to break over 750 laws. George is the only sitting president to have admitted to breaking laws and for openly disdaining the constitution as an "old scrap of paper." How can we peaceniks be accused of being anti-American when the squatter in the Oval Office has no respect for the supreme law of the land? But of course, 9/11 changed the world and we are a nation "at war" so George thinks he can do whatever he wants even though he is the one who made us a nation at war with his lies and deceptions. I will stipulate that the constitution is a deeply flawed document, but the founders realized this and gave we future generations ways to amend it and one of the ways to amend it is not just "cuz the president says so." He may be the decider but he is not the amender.
Extreme rendition and torture are being authorized from the top and carried out in the name of the American people. A recent Amnesty International report calls torture "widespread" for people in US captivity. CIA trained black operatives have even bragged how inhuman and brutal that water-boarding is and gave a high level terrorist his persecution props for being able to last over two minutes. In this particularly lovely form of torture, a person has cellophane wrapped around his mouth and nose and tipped at an angle so water pours over his face--thus creating the feeling of drowning--so to avoid choking, the prisoner succumbs. Our own torturers, who have to go through the ropes, can last for only a few seconds in this torture. Add the sexual depravation practiced on the prisoners with the tormenting of some prisoners by flushing the Koran and so forth: then not only is the humanity of the tortured broken, but the torturer also becomes lower than an animal. I used to watch a lot of Animal Planet but I have never seen nor heard of a four legged creature torturing another four legged creature. However, as long as we Americans condone this behavior from the ones who authorize such viciousness from the top, we are the torturers also. We become the thing that we abhor.
George, Condi, Rummy, Dicky, Wolfie, Colin, et al., went on a media blitz of propaganda before the invasion. We all know now that they were lying and knew they were lying when they told us that Saddam had wmd and would use them on America--he had a fleet of remote control planes that could be deployed to the US at a moment's notice--the smoking gun could come in the shape of a mushroom cloud—Powell pointed out where the wmd were hidden on the map—Saddam was trying to buy yellow-cake uranium from Niger—on and on and on. By the time that the US military began to use wmd on the people of Iraq, we all knew that BushCo were full of camel manure and we watched in horrified, near silence, as the people of Fallujah were burned beyond recognition by white phosphorous and enhanced napalm.
Not withstanding the crimes against our own constitution and the crimes against humanity that BushCo have executed, the assassins with a governmental seal of approval attached, pay lip service to being anti-abortion. The people who run things into the ground for us are nothing about being pro-life. I wonder how our fellow citizens who say that they are pro-life reconcile the fact that their government has massacred thousands of innocent Iraqis, many of whom are mothers, children, babies and unborn babies. These harmless victims have not only been killed by bombs, bullets, shrapnel, but they have been killed by a lack of clean water, medicine, and basic medical care. We can't expect the people who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors to care about the babies of Iraq and will even say: "we have to fight them over there, so we don't fight them over here," but I have to believe that the average American, warnik or not, has to have compassion for the suffering of Iraqi citizens whose only crime is to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Iraqi woman that I have met here in the states is a doctor who works in the Baghdad morgue, she told me that at least 1600 bodies come through her morgue per month. This is just in Baghdad.
Many of my friends voted for George in the 2004 election telling me that he is "pro-life," My answer to them is that George is "pro-birth" and once the baby gets out, he has no problem with subjecting them to inadequate education, health care, clean environment, jobs and, then to boot, killing them in war. If George was truly pro-life, Casey and legions of people would still be alive. Life is life: born and unborn. The corporations in Iraq are the things that need to be aborted. Bring the war profiteers home, save the children.
Dr. Martin Luther King said that if we do not practice non-violent co-existence, we will have to suffer mutual annihilation. With Bush being such a lame duck and under threat of the domino theory of indictment, I shudder to think of the continued war in Iraq and the future wars that he will begin just to bolster his sense of failure and lack of self confidence to insanely insure his place in history. Even he must know that he will not be judged kindly by future historians. It is terribly frightening to think of what a person like this is capable of especially when there are so many bad men with their hands in the profitable cookie jar who are pulling his strings and when he is willing to go along as a willing puppet with the neocon PNAC flow and as a corporate whore to the war profiteers.
If we want to have a viable future to leave as a legacy to our children and the children of the world, BushCo must be stopped, not supported and funded by a Congress who is getting their strings pulled by the same malevolent puppeteers that pull the chains of corporate greed of the executive branch.
We need to shut down the war machine and realize that to feed that monster our country has to be, and has been, at constant war with some country or the other, especially since WWII. It is a fact of life, whether Republican or Democrat in power, we are suppressing and killing other people to make the world safe for our corporations. To help facilitate the spread of the contaminated semen of "Planet America" the leader of every country that stands up to the corporate America are being demonized and are ripe for BushCo to bring them "freedom and democracy" which is really just a Trojan Horse carrying genocide and destruction.
How do we throw a monkey wrench into the war machine? We join boycotts, such as the one against Exxon/Mobil. We buy gas from President Chavez and Venezuela's Citgo to help him in his struggle against corporate America—not against Americans. Hugo Chavez has done more to help the less fortunate citizens in our Northeast and Katrina victims than BushCo who have shown themselves quite adept at fiddling while the world is burning and enriching themselves in the blood soaked process.
Unfortunately, BushCo does symbolize everything that America is about, but they do not have to. We the people of the United States in order to secure a more perfect union need to vociferously and with everything we have stand up to the traitors in power and redefine, if not reclaim, what it means to be Americans. For me, it means living in a country where health care, education, human rights, jobs, peace and prosperity are readily available, not just to the rich white ruling class, but to everyone! This is pro-American. Torture, committing atrocities on a helpless people, and honoring and protecting the life of corporate America above human life are not.
And by the way, if an imminent attack on Iran does not frighten you, think WWIII.
Be pro-American. Urge your congressman, whether he/she is Republican or Democrat, to stand up for our country by supporting articles of impeachment against BushCo. November will be too late for too many people.
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc Casey Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is the author of Not One More Mother's Child and the founder of Gold Star Families for Peace.
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Post by DT1 on Aug 10, 2006 8:03:03 GMT 4
Mod's note:The missdeeds of this misadministration,this exersise in the dumbing down of the presidency,will come to an end.. Live by the sword,die by the sword. GWB and his handlers have done things(locally,Treason, High Crimes and Misdemeanors,globally ,WAR CRIMES,CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,TERRORISM) that can cause them to have nightmares of facing a lengthy trial in the Haige...and an ignonomous,and well-deserved fate. W's hometown lawyer,now Attorney General Alberto"Torquamadda"Gonzalez, is working fifty hour shifts trying to keep Justice from turning her wheels. They are running scared,as well they should be. The Neocon dictatorship experiment has failed,totally and utterly. Commander Terror is,for all intents and pourposes lameducked, until he steps out of office and faces charges. Now,let us begin to clean up the mess. Found this gem in the mailbag at buzzflash.com -DT1Subject: Continue To Pound on ConservatismThe grassroots movement which is rational dialogue on the Internet is gaining considerable momentum. Our fight against a dictatorial, totalitarian form of government forced down our gullets by the Bush/Cheney/Corporate mafia is only in its infancy. Despite their control of broadcast and printed media, holes in the dam are beginning to appear. Despicable men with unimaginable power are frightened by the power of the people, and well they should be. We hold the power to bring them down, not only through the power of public opinion, but through the power of civil disobedience, also known as nonviolent noncooperation. Mohandas Ghandi used the power of civil disobedience to rid India of British Colonial rule. The Mahatma had the support of Hindus and Muslims alike as he selflessly campaigned against the mighty British Empire. When the British mandated that India's people buy milled cloth produced in England, Ghandi organized India's people to produce khadi, their own homespun cloth. When violence erupted between Hindus and Muslims, Ghandi fasted until the violence stopped. He put his life on the line to achieve peace, a far cry from the selfish, infantile, so-called leaders that infest the White House and the legislative bodies. The war machine thrives on American passivity. Defense contractors flourish courtesy of our tax dollars. The entire arrangement is contingent on an uninterrupted flow of cash from tax dollars and unabated consumer spending, which in turn funds the corporations, who then funnel the money via lobbyists and political contributions to achieve the verbatim legislation they seek to keep the wars going, against the wishes of an indisputable majority of Americans. Yet we still dutifully go shopping for items we can most certainly do without. After 9-11, George Bush appeared on television and told a frightened nation to go shopping. This is very telling of conservative survival. They are well aware that a disruption in the flow of cash could quickly bring them to their knees. It costs some $2,000,000,000 a day to finance the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia was almost bankrupted by its occupation of Afghanistan. The biggest losers during that occupation were the Russian people. They witnessed loss of services, hyperinflation and massive losses of human lives. This is the same road down which the Bush criminals are leading the people of the United States, the road to oblivion. During World War II, Americans voluntarily underwent many austerities to further the war effort. Prominent figures in the entertainment industry went on radio and appeared in movie trailers to ask Americans to buy bonds. Rationing was accepted by citizens as a justifiable hardship to defeat Hitler and his Nazis. Bush, however, tells Americans to go shopping. The chickenhawks have borrowed billions from China and other foreign governments. They are currently selling off highways, bridges and as many American resources as they can to foreign interests. We, the people, are the rightful owners of America's land, water, air and resources. Politicians, elected as the trustees of these resources, are violating the public trust on a daily basis to further enrich themselves and their corporate benefactors. What to speak of the short end of the stick, Americans will be left with nary a splinter if government continues unchecked. We used to rely on the Press to act as the guardian against governmental malfeasance. Journalism has been bought through the consolidation of all media in the hands of a few. The all-too-wise public has come to the realization that their protectors in the media have been corrupted. The onus of checking our wayward leadership has fallen to us. We used to be able to remove reprobates from power through our power to choose by voting miscreants from office. That power, as well, has been corrupted by a one-party rule of government that stops at absolutely nothing to maintain its choke hold on our throats. So it comes down to us. We must not succumb to the emotional temptation to resort to violence. That would play right into their hands, bringing a rationale for suspending the Constitution, imposing martial law and imprisoning Americans en masse in concentration camps. It is imperative that we fight the dictators with any means at our disposal other than violence. Our lack of action is being seen throughout the world as an acceptance of the brutal practices carried out by the ruling party. We cannot resort to violence born of panic or rage. We will, at the time of our choosing, throw a gargantuan wrench in the works. We will shut down this country and force the hand of our captors. We will coordinate on a national level through the Internet and telecommunications to pick our moment. A few courageous souls are already acting independently and in limited concert to achieve our common goal. These true patriots have our sincerest well-wishes. They have shown us the way out of darkness. We will follow their example and unite as a people to end tyrannical rule in the United States. A single twig can be easily broken by two fingers' pressure. A bundle of sticks cannot be broken so easily. Together, united, determined, single-minded and in cooperation, like a phalanx of army ants, we can remove all obstacles in our path to reclaim our country. The sun is setting for the dying dinosaurs who have fallen into their own tar pits. They are clawing and thrashing about wildly as the oozing quagmire envelops them. The age of mammals approaches. Amicusbriefs USA
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Post by DT1 on Aug 18, 2006 13:28:14 GMT 4
August 17, 2006 at 08:57:44 The Link Between How We Think and Whether We'll Win: II. Restoration, not Revolution, Is the Realistic Goal by Andrew Bard Schmookler www.opednews.comFor the past two years, I've been working full-time to oppose this Bushite regime because I believe it is doing profound and systematic damage to America, to the world, to the planet. It has been my conviction that in this regime, power has been seized by a set of forces animated by a spirit that warrants being called evil. Never in the history of this nation, I believe, has so much power been in the hands of such dark forces. My writings about the many dimensions of this have elicited many responses seeking to press upon me and other readers a different perspective. Rather than stressing the special nature of this Bushite regime, they emphasize that this regime is only a worse version of what's been there in the American power system all along. Whenever I describe and interpret the evils of the current ruling forces, they come forward to say, in effect, "This is nothing new. Look at these long-standing American evils." Where I see extraordinary dishonesty in our rulers, where I see America having become a global bully, where I see an especially vicious political modus operandi, where I see unprecedented disregard of the law and the Constitution-- these people come forward to talk about the enduring problems of American capitalism and plutocracy, of American imperialism and abuse of power, of American racism, of corruptions in the American market-place of ideas, etc. America has always been pervaded by injustice, corruption, lies, etc., is their refrain-- almost regardless of the immediate subject under discussion. It is this, they say, more than the specific nature of this Bush presidency, that we should be loud in denouncing. I would argue that these people are an impediment to our success against this regime, that their continual diversion of the discussion from the immediate evils of this regime onto the long-standing problems of the American polity and society can only help the Bushites in their quest to hold onto power. For the present, I will leave aside the question of whether or not this leftist perception of the American status quo ante is correct. That issue will be engaged in the next installment of this series. But even if we were to stipulate that their analysis is right, their continual promotion of this perspective would STILL be a mistake. This emphasis on the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American system would still be an obstacle to our victory. Regardless of its truth, this leftist emphasis helps the regime that they agree is evil. The reason for this derives from the central idea of the first installment, namely that ENLISTING MAJORITY PUBLIC OPINION IS OUR ONLY WAY TO DEFEAT THIS REGIME. Big majorities of the American people would agree that the president should not lie to the American people; that the president is obliged to obey the law and honor his oath of office to defend the Constitution; that it is dishonorable to use character assassination as a tool in the quest for power in our democracy; that it is wrong for an American leader to take the country to war on false pretenses; that our elections should be honest and fair; that science should not be falsified for political purposes; that the media should report the truth; etc. etc. Awakening the American people to the true nature and conduct of this regime can rally a majority of the American people around such shared American values. But most Americans are nowhere within striking distance of supporting the idea that the basic, traditional American systems of government and economy are inherently deeply flawed. The idea, more specifically, that America's role in the world has for generations been a shameful one is not one that there's a snowball's chance in hell will be supported by the preponderance of public opinion. The idea that America's liberal democracy has been a sham for generations, or even throughout its history, is not one that anything more than a tiny fringe is likely to support at any foreseeable time. The idea that America's market economy should be jettisoned and replaced, because of its being inherently unjust and exploitative, is not something that a majority of the American people are anywhere close to believing. Yet these ideas, and others like them, are what a great many on the left seem to be most interested in promoting when they give voice in the political sphere. And quite often, when the subject is the way that the Bushites have been trampling upon what most Americans believe to be basic American values, these people will seek to divert the conversation away from the damage and dangers from this regime to make the point that those values have ALWAYS been trampled upon. Even though these people will generally concede that this proto-fascist regime is even worse than its predecessors, they seek to direct our efforts not against this Bush regime so much as against what they see as the persistent evils of American society. But in today's political environment, as created by the Bush-Rove team, with their pervasive lies and false patriotism and fear-mongering, there's no meaningful chance for remedying America's long-standing problems. What is at stake at this moment is not major transformation such as the left believes in, but rather whether or not the United States will descend further into fascism. When it comes to public opinion, the issue is not whether the American public can be swayed toward a leftist perspective on power. It is whether the mainstream of the American public will continue to be seduced by the powers that have been driving the nation toward a fascist state or whether they can be rallied to the defense of liberal democracy. Radical change is now afoot in America, but it is coming not from the left but from the amoral forces aligned with the right. The radical change the leftists would like is nowhere near being on the menu. Of the scenarios it is at all realistic to consider, the best is for the mainstream of the American public to join forces with the left in defense of our shared, established, traditional American values and institutions. This would be true even if the left were right about the flaws in those established American institutions and values. So long as it is agreed that the way power is being wielded in America now is worse than usual, the defense of liberal democracy against fascism is what the left should willingly agree to fight for. Willingly, but how enthusiastically? For those who regard the difference between the Bush regime and its predecessors as less than dramatic, the goal of restoring the status quo ante of our liberal democracy might be less than inspiring. Which brings us to the questions, to be dealt with in the next installment: how profound is the difference between the Bushite regime and the normal political situation in America, and how worth fighting for is the traditional system of America's liberal democracy? Here too, I will argue, the left's way of thinking is flawed. (mod's note:This site is absolutely amazing nonesoblind.org)Andrew Bard Schmookler's website, www.nonesoblind.org ,is devoted to understanding the roots of America?s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America?s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Schmookler can be reached at andythebard@comcast.net
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Post by DT1 on Sept 4, 2006 9:45:49 GMT 4
Why I am a TerroristBy Charles Sullivan 09/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- - According to the twisted logic recently espoused by Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the failure to support illegal, immoral and unnecessary wars defines one as a terrorist. Let me be clear about where I stand: I know who the real terrorists are, and can name each one of them—Rumsfeld among the rest. Everywhere you go in America you see the slogan, “Support our troops.” You see it on bumper stickers, storefronts, flags and banners, yellow ribbons and even in the windows of private homes. But what does it mean to support our troops? Is it to send them into harm’s way; to invade and occupy sovereign nations in illegal wars for empire? Is it to ask them to commit heinous crimes, to maim and to kill innocent civilians; to torture, insult, and to humiliate people who have done us no harm? Is it to steal the natural wealth that belongs to other nations and turn it over to American corporations? If that is what it means, then I cannot support our troops. I cannot wish them well if their purpose is conquer other people, and plunder the wealth of other countries that have done us no harm. That would require me to endorse crimes against humanity conducted under the guise of national security and patriotism. I cannot do that—I will not. It is simply wrong. Neither should we, as we so often do, confuse supporting our troops with supporting the president, or wrongful and immoral policies of corrupt government. The president and his ilk do not support our troops or he would not use them as pawns; he would take care of them when they come home broken and torn with psychic scars. He does not care about them—they are only a means to an end. No, the best way to support our troops is to take a principled stand; to hold the moral high ground—to bring them home alive and whole. A government must not be allowed to require any of its citizens to engage in immoral or criminal behavior on its behalf. When a government behaves like a crime syndicate it does not mean that the people should follow its example—they must provide a better alternative, and refuse their allegiance to it. So if the failure to support a government’s wrongful policies makes me a terrorist—so be it. If speaking truth to power makes one a terrorist—sign me up; move me to top of the NSA and FBI lists of suspects. Send forth the assassins with their rifles. If exposing the lies and corruption that attends power makes me a terrorist—I will proudly wear the crown and bear the cost. I will cheerfully take my place alongside other terrorists with names like Thoreau, Debs, King, Gandhi, Einstein, Zinn, and Christ. Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free-lance writer residing in the hinterland of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com
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Post by DT1 on Sept 11, 2006 4:55:44 GMT 4
By Ted Lang Exclusive to Rense.com © 2004-2006 All Rights Reservered 9-10-6 Many alternative media writers whose patriotic base is founded on truth, fact and the nation's rule of law, have long identified the Bush administration as the "Bush regime." The implication is clear: the Bush regime operates totally outside the law. The practice of torturing defenseless detainees that have not been adjudicated as being either criminals or prisoners of war, or even proven as terrorists, but merely categorized as potential enemies of the American state by decree rather than trial by jury, is not only totally foreign to the national character of the American people, but totally violates the law of our land. Considering the horrific and deliberate deviation from what has always distinguished the American people as a nation wholly dependent on the equity and justice that is so central to our rule of law, the activities of the Bush regime regarding the so-called "war on terror" demonstrates the total absence of even a modicum of collective morality on the part of the Bush rank and file. This "administration" is indeed now unequivocally definable as a criminal regime. A fissure in the wall of "creative law" hyped by the Bush criminals and established by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in his infamous torture memo, the latter attempting to legitimize Bush's unilateral termination of long-standing international agreements and the Geneva Convention, is now beginning to appear. It is important, once again, to reiterate my firm belief that President Bush is not endowed with even a semblance of the intellect required to comprehend the creative legalese of Gonzales' regulatory sorcery. But, short of Bush being declared mentally incompetent, Bush must be held personally accountable for his "administration" and made to face responsibility as its head. In their article written for The Nation, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith write: "The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority - perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all 'anti-terrorism' package. Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?" Once again, the criminal Bush administration is operating in secret, and will be furiously protected by the Zionist-Marxist media mafia that favors the Bush policies that advance the imperial desires of Israel in the Mid-East. And although Brecher and Smith, in their September 5th article entitled, "Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act," offers the same tired old remedy of "contacting our representatives in Washington," their detailed analysis is frustrated by their hopeful outlook dependent upon the integrity, morality and honesty on the part of the members of our so-called United States Congress. When has our Congress ever demonstrated in our lifetime their devotion to America's rule of law? Ours is a failed republic, made so by a dependency on a rule of law that has been, and continues to be, totally ignored. The Constitution of the United States has been quietly abolished by our now secret government. Even the Founders acknowledged that without government officials and representatives imbued with a sense of decency and morality that serve our nation based on a strict code of personal ethics, both the nation and its constitution will be lost. And both have been! The foundation of American government today is cold, hard cash. And that's all there is. AIPAC has purchased our elected politicians, who even now are more correctly defined as "elected criminals," considering their campaign finance rules that protect incumbents and their selling out to the highest bidder. Israel receives $3 to 5 billion annually from American taxpayers, and then funnels their non-earned booty right back to their Israel Lobby, AIPAC, in Washington, which then contributes heavily to the campaigns of our elected politicians who aggressively represent and protect Israel and certainly not US. And the Bush regime has served Israel more than any other "American" administration in history. Where is there any modicum of reciprocity that can be judged as any real benefit to US? The only ones benefiting from this spurious arrangement are the international corporate oil conglomerates and the fascist military industrial complex. Bush's loyalty to globalism, however, as evidenced by his feverish desire to dissolve our borders, legalize illegal aliens, and export all middle-class employment overseas, is more characteristic of the agenda of international communism. Bush and his regime display no loyalty whatsoever to our national sovereignty; even Hitler couldn't be accused of that. Isn't it curious, how detention centers, detainee torture, carpet-bombing of unarmed citizenry with internationally-banned napalm and white phosphorous, and other acts of genocide and mass murder that totally disregard international standards of military conflict were employed by our own forces immediately upon the formulation of our Mid-Eastern policy under Israeli tutelage and leadership? As Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their now famous Harvard research paper, "The Israel Lobby," have stated, "The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides." As stated: this alliance is a one-way street benefiting only Israel. The "strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives" do not, of course, exist. It's the cash, stupid! The undue allegiance to, and reverence for, the "security" of Israel explains the suicidal stampede on the part of the Bush regime to rush to war with Iraq, thereby inviting legally sloppy, glaring mistakes after the blessings of 9/11. Pulling off this major massacre of Americans by elements of the criminal Bush regime is what has enabled the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon, and will be used again to further justify, in the deranged criminal minds of Bush's neocon handlers, the "need" to attack Syria and Iran. All will be perpetrated in accordance with the plan for an invincible Israel in the Mid East to control the bulk of the world's oil supply. And only now is The New York Times on board as evidenced by its September 8th article, "C.I.A. Said to Find No Hussein Link to Terror Chief," authored by Mark Mazzetti. Murray Waas of National Review first broke this story in November, 2005. The Zionist-Marxists at the Times took almost a year to report it; can we expect to see something yet on the "Downing Street Memo?" Nah! Yet, in his exclusive article which Waas published on November 22, 2005, entitled, "There Was No 9-11 Iraq Connection," Waas opens with, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter." And a later article by investigative reporter Waas detailed how Bush decided to ignore the advice of the CIA to NOT go ahead with his fraudulent SOTA proclaiming British intelligence had uncovered Saddam's plot to obtain Niger "yellowcake." No wonder there's been a falling out between the regime and the "new" CIA! But I have digressed. Based upon the national character of the Jewish state, let's quickly lose the illusion that our "friends" in Tel-Aviv will get our oil to US for "wholesale." The only hope for a political solution to America's problem will be the exercise of both legal restraints upon the Bush crime machine, as well as the enforcement of penalties for the heinous war crimes against humanity by Bush and Israel. The USA PATRIOT Act will take care of resistance on the part of the treasonous American people, all of whom are guilty of terrorism until tortured and proven innocent. And now they've got "pretty, perky" Katie Couric to ease our fall from individual freedom to the slavery and misery of the gulag. Doesn't it astonish that right-wing fascist Rush Limbaugh teamed up with the "pretty perky" one thereby joining the "liberal" press in their monumental support and protection of the Bush crime machine? It is for this reason that the War Crimes Act must be quickly and secretly rescinded. And never mind about that "godammed piece of paper" that bans bills of attainder and ex post facto laws; who cares about that outdated piece of crap anyway? Brecher and Smith elaborate giving some background on the War Crimes Act: "American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year. After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land." Brecher and Smith continue: "Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a 'war crime' as any 'grave breach' of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law. The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 'torture memo.' Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, 'substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.'" Preceding this now-established fact proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that the criminal Bush regime is guilty of international war crimes, "A federal judge in Detroit ruled ... that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional, delivering the first decision that the Bush administration's effort to monitor communications without court oversight runs afoul of the Bill of Rights and federal law," reported Dan Eggen and Dafna Linzer in their August 18th article, "Judge Rules Against Wiretaps" in the Washington Post. Eggen and Linzer continue: "U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ordered a halt to the wiretap program, secretly authorized by President Bush in 2001, but both sides in the lawsuit agreed to delay that action until a Sept. 7 hearing. Legal scholars said Taylor's decision is likely to receive heavy scrutiny from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit when the Justice Department appeals, and some criticized her ruling as poorly reasoned." But who really cares about her "reasoning?" The question should be easy to assess: did the Bush regime break the law, or didn't it? The answer is obvious. Again, reflect upon how a criminal, secret regime such as this ignores and abuses our nation's rule of law. Reflect also upon how this regime has used our military to illegally invade a country and to mass murder innocent and unarmed non-combatant citizens, and how our military has also been encouraged and even directed to torture not only captured individuals held in illegal captivity, but also randomly kidnapped individuals snatched simply to be tortured to "see if they know anything." Could "people" such as these plan and perpetrate 9/11, and mass murder their own citizens to launch their reign of terror via a "war on terror"? Am I required to answer this for you? Now can you just imagine how easily this country could be saved by the mere existence of a free and independent press? Take a look at the anger in the video clip of CNN's Jack Cafferty on the "Cafferty File". Wouldn't it be great if Bush crime machine sycophants such as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity and Drudge decided that their country was more important than Israel and the New World Order? But you see, such brilliant fellows simply "don't believe in conspiracy theories," so they won't even examine the basic scientific premises expounded upon logically and thoroughly by the 9/11 truth movement and the growing army of scholars, engineers and former government bureaucrats and high-ranking military officers. Apparently, once again, it's the cash stupid. They simply can't afford to lose all that money by "going straight" and coming clean; never mind that the greatest bastion of individual human freedom will be sacrificed so that they can hold on to their wealth and lifestyles. Cafferty, Olbermann, Dobbs and others are trying, but their jobs are also dependent on the Jewish media mafia that dominates them as much as they do Charlie Sheen and Ed Asner. Remember how quickly after denouncing the Bush regime's 9/11 crimes Sheen's divorce particulars were aired to shut him up? Remember how they nixed Asner's scheduled appearance on CNN? We need "hate crimes" legislation, but not laws directed at "anti-Semites." We need laws directed squarely at "pro-Semites," meaning the traitors who have bought our government out from under US and replaced it with the most technically advanced and therefore the greatest danger to human freedom in all the history of mankind. I feel something is going to happen, and I feel it will happen soon. If we could only hear a Charlie Sheen on national TV. Or perhaps a Congressman Ron Paul speaking nationally instead of to himself in front of the wasteoid House of "Representatives," we might just have another chance. There are a lot of people out there in possession of the naked truth; perhaps one of them will come forward with their story. Republished courtesy of rense.com
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Sept 23, 2006 8:43:39 GMT 4
The Center Cannot Hold: The Bush Regime in Crisisby Juan Santos www.dissidentvoice.orgSeptember 21, 2006 The headlines tell the tale: From the Washington Post: “Torture Is Torture” From the Boston Globe: “Rebelling against torture and Bush” From Fox News: “Bush Faces Election Year Revolt in Own Party” From Legal News Television: “Bush Fears War Crimes Prosecution” The President is naked: He is no longer a “wartime president”; he’s now the Torture President. Officials in the Bush White House could be charged with war crimes. So they were warned by then -- White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez after they launched their war against Afghanistan, according to documents obtained by Newsweek last Spring. Gonzalez warned that violations of the War Crimes Act can be punished severely -- including by death, and that it was “difficult to predict with confidence” how a future Justice Department might apply the law. Special focus was placed on language in the Geneva Conventions that condemns "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners. These crimes were "undefined," according to Gonzalez, the same plea we hear today from President Bush. Warning the administration of its potential culpability, Gonzalez urged the President, to, in effect, bluff it out. He wrote, "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." A series of Administration torture memos have been made public, memos vetted by Gonzalez, lawyers at the National Security Council and staffers for Vice President Dick Cheney. They were meant to provide the regime with legal cover for state-approved torture and held that Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, was above the law. According to a Justice Department memo on August 1, 2002, the administration’s “ban on torture is limited to only the most extreme forms of physical and mental harm" -- actions that might cause "death or organ failure." Anything “less,” the regime defined as mere “abuse.” “Abuse” would seem to include these techniques used against detainees in Iraq, according to an FBI memo released by the ACLU: “strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings." In a February 2002 letter, Bush took the matter of torture on himself: "I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority to suspend Geneva (conventions) as between the United States and Afghanistan. I reserve the right to exercise this authority in this or future conflicts." That defense evaporated with the recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which held that the US is bound by the letter of the Geneva Conventions. The administration, facing the reality of potential prosecution as war criminals, is increasingly desperate. The GOP is a party in revolt against itself, one trying to distance itself from itself, ducking for cover from itself and from the fallout of simultaneously being too fascistic and not fascistic enough. The Bush regime and the Republicans are in profound danger on other fronts as well. Following the lead of imperialist strategists from Democrat Zbignew Brzezinski to the Project for a New American Century, the regime committed itself to a plan of conquest in the Middle East and Central Asia, and to a fascistic program of political and racial repression at home, all under the rubric of a “war on terror.” Bush apparently took Brzezinski literally when he warned in The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 call for a US global hegemony: “It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. The Bush crew determined, in any case, to make the US less “democratic” at “home,” and to launch a series of pre-planned wars for global dominance abroad Deeply hated by people everywhere, on the verge of losing power in the House and Senate, divided over torture, spying, military tribunals, secret prisons, immigration, and plans for war against Iran, mired in loss in Iraq, rocked by scandal and widespread corruption, exposed as mass killers of the innocent in Lebanon and as racists in New Orleans, the Republican regime is finding that its center cannot hold. The Christian Science Monitor says that 61% of people in the US oppose the war in Iraq. By a margin of 52% to 43%, respondents to a Zogby poll want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge’s approval -- which, of course, he did. The Republican Party and the Bush regime are in chaos. Strategically, the Republicans have pushed things to a breaking point: they’ve overextended the Empire in ways that could lead to its defeat. At last the mainstream press is on the attack -- they want no imperial defeat -- and would-be “moderate” Republican imperialists like John McCain are in rebellion. Even Colin Powell, who as one pundit noted “helped design and lead” Bush’s policy toward “terrorists,” is on the attack, breaking his public silence on the matter of torture years after the fact. The lifeboat is filled with rats. Republican operatives have a keen eye on Bush’s military lap dog, Tony Blair, as his engine sputters in mid-flight, as his key supporters demand his resignation, his Labor Party painfully aware that if it “stays the course” its dominance of British politics is lost. Blair has promised to resign by Spring -- just long enough to help Bush launch war against Iran, one assumes. Even here the Republicans are divided. According to Martin Walker of UPI, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cold feet over the regime’s plan for striking Iran while Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing all the harder for war. Walker writes, “This heralds the first important policy breech between the triumvirate of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, sometimes known in Washington as "the iron triangle," in almost six years of the Bush administration.” Let no one think the mainstream press or the Republicans suddenly “got religion,” or anything else akin to morality. The Bush regime is failing miserably -- in Iraq and elsewhere -- at fulfilling the geo-strategic mandate laid out by the “Democrat’s Kissinger,” Brzezinski whose strategic thinking finds striking parallels in the Project for a New American Century cabal that runs the White House. "The most immediate task,” Brzezinski wrote, “is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role." The Bush failure in Iraq sets the stage for just such a scenario to unfold, and the regime’s move on Iran threatens to crystallize an opposing war bloc -- precisely the bloc Brzezinski most openly worried about in The Grand Chessboard, one that might expel the US from Eurasia or severely limit its imperial designs there: Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an "antihegemonic" coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower. The Republicans have nothing of the certainty the Labor Party shows. Some think they’ve gone too far, others not far enough down the road to global war and internal repression. Bush faces one “revolt from below” in the Senate over torture and military tribunals, and another from House Republicans who favor a profoundly racist and punitive attack on brown migrants. Seven leading conservatives, including Richard Viguerie and Christopher Buckley recently issued a call in the Washington Monthly for a Republican defeat. The Republicans can no longer rule, and the Democrats offer no alternative at all; however you slice it, the US is still the US, and if anything stirs people here it is hatred of Bush and Cheney, not love for the imperialist “B” team called the Democrats. If there were a mass radical movement in the US, the Bush regime would be toast. The only force poised to fully capitalize on the Republican crisis is the Democratic Party. It’s a crime. Silent during all the long years of torture and “secret” prisons, silent on the coming war against Iran, silent on Iraq -- except to say that they know how such things should be done -- silent as they played along with developments toward fascism, the Democrats will now pose as upholders of the “real” “American” values. And it will be a lie. They will impeach and try Bush if they can and if they have to by resorting to nothing but lies: “America” really doesn’t torture they will say -- while evading the history of the Philippines, Viet Nam, the Indian Wars, and the death squads and torture regimes the Empire has backed from the Shah of Iran to Guatemala, to their ex-puppet Saddam Hussein himself. But make no mistake, despite the Democrats, the emerging crisis of the Bush regime is of historical importance. At this moment the Empire’s rulers are vacillating -- they can’t back down and apparently can’t move forward. What we see developing could turn quickly into a vacuum of power, a paralysis of the ruling class. That means its time for us to stop vacillating. The regime is not all powerful. The steamroller toward fascism is not unstoppable. It never was. Their grip is slipping, right now. This is a chance for us to stop the coming war against Iran and with it the awful risk of a nuclear war; to force a pullout from Iraq, to stop the secret dungeons and torture chambers; to abort fascism in the US -- to see it stillborn. Even, perhaps, to clear the path so we can force drastic action on global warming, to stop the mass death of Life on Earth. It’s not time to rely on the Republican’s Silent Partner. It’s time to take it to the streets. It’s our chance to drive out the Bush regime. It’s the only chance we’ll get. Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/.
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Sept 28, 2006 9:10:51 GMT 4
Anthrax, Iran & bin Laden: Waiting for the October Surprise Published on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org by Heather Wokusch Presidential advisor Karl Rove has been touting his "October surprise," aimed at keeping Republicans in office. While Rove will most certainly exploit the fear factor, the question remains if we'll let ourselves be fooled - yet again. It's worth remembering that only five years ago, the US was reeling under anthrax attacks which killed five people and ground postal services to a halt. It's also worth noting what happened next. Even though the Bush administration soon realized that the anthrax source was domestic, Vice President Dick Cheney played the war card in claiming Osama bin Laden's terrorist training manuals teach "how to deploy these kinds of substances." While Congress admirably resisted adopting the odious Patriot Act in the weeks following 9/11, both chambers quickly caved when two Democratic senators' offices were subsequently targeted with anthrax-laced letters. Coincidentally, Congress also resisted renewing the Patriot Act in February 2006, but after a nerve agent scare on Capitol Hill led to the quarantine of 200 people, it caved once again. The big story behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, however, was never properly covered: White House staff had started taking Cipro, an anthrax-treatment drug, a full week before the first attack even occurred. You've got to wonder what prior information the Bush administration had - and why it was not communicated to the US public. While serious questions behind the anthrax incidents may never be answered, the attacks were phenomenally successful in two ways: providing justification for the Bush administration to rev up spending on biodefense and adding more fuel to the fire for an invasion of Iraq. So perhaps Rove's surprise will involve some form of domestic bioweapons attack, handily foiled by Bush's superior intelligence capabilities. How intriguing that Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion farce aimed at protecting the American public after the anthrax attacks, has been getting a lot of flak recently. A little domestic scare might give the administration's pharmaceutical boondoggle more credibility. A second possibility is that Rove plans to serve up bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush had originally requested. Recent rumors of bin Laden's having succumbed to typhoid support the possibility, yet he was also reported to have died before the 2002 congressional elections. The very thought of eliminating bin Laden might score Republicans some easy votes, but it's hard to imagine he will be permanently bumped off until a new, equally scary bogeyman is made available. The most terrifying prospect is that the October surprise will involve an attack on Iran, and all signs indicate the growing possibility. A US armada of war ships, including a nuclear aircraft carrier, is due to arrive off Iran's coast in the third week of October, and according to retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner, the US is already conducting preparatory military operations inside the country. Rove may reason that a US attack on Tehran's alleged nuclear-weapons facilities would be enough to rally the public around Republicans come November, but it's a cataclysmic miscalculation. The Iranian military's Blow of Zolfaqar war games last month demonstrated that the country is armed and ready to fight, and Tehran's other options are just as devastating: activating Hezbollah, inciting further violence in Iraq and interrupting the world's oil supply. The patent contradiction of waiting for a surprise aside, we've got to show more sophistication this time in preempting Rove's inevitable trick or treat. The stakes are just too high. This article is partially excerpted from The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now (Volume 1) by Heather Wokusch. For Action Ideas or to learn more about The Progressives' Handbook series, visit www.progressiveshandbook.com. Heather can also be reached at www.heatherwokusch.com###
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